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It Girl, Interrupted

Beverly Hills, 1976: Andy Warhol was in his element, surrounded by the biggest names in fashion, art, cinema and finance, as well as by Europeans with blood in various shades of blue. The Marchesa Cacciapuoti di Giugliano (better known as Gogo Schiaparelli) and her aviaphobe second husband, Gino, had traveled for weeks by land and by sea from Paris for the wedding of her eldest daughter, the former Vogue cover girl Marisa Berenson. A sometime actress and full-time beauty, 29-year-old Marisa (pronounced mah-REE-za) was the regnant queen of the international jet set, who had found her king in the industrialist James H. Randall, 32. The setting for this Hollywood hitchin' was suitably de trop: the swimming pool was covered with flowers, the altar in white leatherette; George Hamilton was the best man. Oblivious to the mayhem, the assiduously tanned designer Valentino calmly ironed the off-the-shoulder gown he'd created for the celebrated bride. Warhol snapped away for a behind-the-scenes book he was doing on the wedding, while Rona Barrett grilled guests like Jack and Anjelica for a television special on the event.

The marriage was a Hollywood flop, lasting scarcely 18 months, but short of Paris or Nicky Hilton's marrying Donald Trump -- underwater -- it's hard to imagine the nuptials of any current It Girl creating such a media circus. Society pages may be teeming with celebrity siblings -- superdebs and aristobrats, related by blood and a hunger for publicity -- but Marisa and her photographer sister, Berry, created the template for stylish sister acts in the spotlight.

Marisa -- whom Yves Saint Laurent had dubbed ''the girl of the 70's'' and Elle magazine crowned ''the most beautiful girl in the world'' -- was the first Berenson sister to emerge from the shadow of their famous grandmother, the couturiere Elsa Schiaparelli. After their father died in 1965, Marisa moved to New York and made a name as a model before acting in the 70's classics ''Death in Venice,'' ''Cabaret'' and ''Barry Lyndon.''

A Zelig of the zeitgeist, Marisa had a knack for popping up at the right place at the right time. Whether meditating with the Beatles at the ashram of the guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, sun worshiping with the beau monde at Gérald de St. Tropez or genuflecting at Warhol's altar at the Factory, Marisa was deified in the press. As Harper's Bazaar cooed in 1972, ''She's a seismograph, registering the latest tremors in the current of the moment -- the newest trends, places to go, ways to look.''

For her part, Marisa's younger sister, Berry -- the peacemaker in a family of women -- photographed the boutique beat for Vogue, and was a fixture on the New York party circuit before settling down to marry the ''Psycho'' star Anthony Perkins.

If the Berenson girls seemed unusually social, it's because they left the gate racing. As youngsters, they had been taught to dance by Gene Kelly, groomed by Diana Vreeland (she nicknamed them Mauretania and Berengaria, after the Cunard ocean liners) and educated in the social graces by their mother and grandmother, who played host at stylish Parisian salons. To the public, their lives were a glacé confection glazed with A-list parties, winters in Klosters, and summers in Venice and Tunisia.

''Although their lives look so charmed and golden,'' says their longtime friend Nuala Boylan, who runs a photographic studio and designs a home-accessories line, ''there's been a lot of pain and hard work that most people don't see behind the It Girl image. For all of their beauty, brains, grace and appeal to the public, they have suffered. Berry had to deal with the very public revelation that her husband had died from AIDS at a time when there was so much paranoia and misinformation. The aftermath was incredibly traumatic for her. It's a testament to the sisters' strength and support for each other -- they haven't fought for as long as I've known them -- that they and their children have emerged from these horrible times.''

The designer Valentino concurs. ''I think life has changed Marisa a lot,'' he says. ''Today Marisa is aware of how many difficulties life is made of. She has not had a happy marriage, and she learned at her own expense how difficult it is to survive in the movie business. All this makes her a very human, very humble and very strong and touching woman.''

''Of course, there's always another side to things,'' Marisa says over brunch at New York's Rainbow Room, her wrists and ear lobes drooping with jewelry. ''On the surface everything seems so shiny and glamorous, but there's also a lot of other things going on. I have a wonderful daughter'' -- Starlite Melodie, now 23 -- ''but it wasn't easy bringing up a child alone. Both my marriages didn't work out. I had a very difficult relationship with my mother, which took many years to resolve. My face went through the windscreen in a car accident in Brazil, which killed the two people who crashed into us. I'm not complaining, but everyone has their pain and tragedies in life -- it doesn't matter how famous or blessed you are.''

She suddenly seems distracted. ''I'm sorry,'' she says, ''is it me, or is it freezing in here? I'm frilleuse, as they say.'' A polyglot educated from age 5 at Europe's strictest boarding schools, Marisa inserts foreign phrases into her conversation the way Kate Moss chains through Marlboro Lights. She's late for our interview because of a ''manifestation'' across town; she's always been fascinated by the ''esoterique''; modeling is -- how you say? -- ''éphémère,'' and next week she's attending a ''vernissage'' at her friend's gallery.

Although her once-flourishing movie career reached a plateau in the 80's, Marisa recently finished a five-month stint on Broadway in a production of Noël Coward's ''Design for Living'' and is working on a skin-care line devised in partnership with her holistic doctor. She also enjoys returning to Paris, where she feels most at home, to spend time with her mother, Gogo.

Prior to their reconciliation, mother and daughter enjoyed a famously fractious relationship, at one point arguing, live, on French television. ''I have a really good relationship with her now,'' Marisa says, ''so I don't really want to go into it, but it wasn't easy growing up. I resented being away from her so much and didn't have the affection I craved. We certainly didn't have the warmth and open communication that I've tried to have with my daughter. Sometimes it's difficult for generations to get on. I realize that now as a mother.''

Marisa may have aged chronologically and emotionally, but not physically. If she's had surgery, it's impossible to tell where. The work, apparently, has been on the inside. ''I've been on a spiritual quest from the age of 12,'' she says, sounding more Californian than trans-Atlantic. ''There's more to life than worrying about wrinkles. I've worked really hard at being on this planet, at being spiritual in a totally superficial world. That's the core of my strength. I don't know how else I could have survived a lot of the things I've been through. It took me a while not to feel confused, and to feel comfortable in my own skin.''

Nuala Boylan recalls Marisa's being lampooned when she told a magazine that she was more interested in treading the path to enlightenment than the catwalk. ''We laugh at it now,'' she says, ''but Marisa was on a cover of People in the 70's, absolutely covered in furs. She was on the arm of David de Rothschild, one of the world's richest men, and the cover line said, 'Marisa Berenson wants to be a saint.' She'd told the interviewer that, and, of course, they used the quote. The thing is, she meant it. It's part of her beauty and innocence that she can be so open.''

As if to prove she is also beautiful on the inside, when she was approached in the mid-1990's to write a book about her life as a former scene queen, Marisa chose instead to reveal her inner quest in ''Au delà du Miroir'' (''Beyond the Mirror''), which was published -- only in French. ''I didn't want to write a book about who I know and who I've slept with,'' says Marisa, who was frequently squired by playboy-heirs like de Rothschild, Ricky von Opel and the Baron Arnaud de Rosnay. ''I wanted to write about the things that are important to me. The side of me that could enhance or help another person, not the person they've read about in magazines a million times. I'm not ready to write that book, but, you know, I don't hide from my past. It's made me who I am.''

According to her friend the designer Diane Von Furstenberg, it's a mistake to dismiss Marisa as a fashion fossil. ''People always focus on her past,'' she says, ''but she still looks amazing, she models in magazines, she modeled for Galliano on the catwalk last year, she's on Broadway, she's constantly working. She's not a relic.''

For someone who feels the ache of spiritual hunger, Marisa is understanding when it comes to the public's constant craving for details about her upbringing. ''I realize that people are still interested in my past,'' she says good-naturedly, ''especially my grandmother. But why wouldn't they be? She was an amazingly glamorous and intelligent woman.''

Although Marisa's relationship with Schiaparelli, whom the sisters called ''Schiap,'' was as thorny as Schiaparelli's relationship had been with her own daughter, in the late 1960's the fiercely independent Marisa moved into the penthouse apartment above her grandmother's hotel particulier on rue de Berri. Just as Marisa's personal style was a boho mix of luxe and gypsy looks, her approach to interiors verged on ''elegant chaos.'' The heart-shaped pink satin pillows, pink boas, photos tacked onto the wall alongside Gainsboroughs and 18th-century paintings reflected the aesthetic of her haute bohemian grandmother.

''Schiap's house was very eclectic,'' she recalls. ''It was five stories and had the most incredible things -- Picassos, Dalis, Cocteaus and Berards up and down the staircases, or sitting on piles of books, Aubusson tapestries, ornate furnishings, vintage books, furs, ceramic leopards, Giacometti lamps. It was full of treasures, but not stiff and formal.''

Marisa's sister, Berry Perkins, who now runs a beachfront bar in Jamaica with her boyfriend, says during one of her occasional trips to New York: ''Schiap had these shocking-pink satin curtains, which she'd obviously had forever, and their bottoms were blackened from those radiators they have in France. She never had them dry-cleaned. She had incredible stuff from all over the world, but she just would place it wherever she felt like it.

''Then you would go downstairs into this amazing kitchen,'' she continues, ''with a huge metal stove and big metal counter tops, and then there was this little bar that was in a cellar, which had been built, I guess, as a bomb shelter in the war. There were all these Toulouse-Lautrec posters; and a collection of tumblers and jugs that she'd collected. We ate a lot of our meals and Schiap threw legendary parties there.''

Although she had her own entrance to the house, Marisa was expected to pay regular visits to her notoriously cantankerous grandmother, who would greet her at the end of the couch, where she sat in the same spot year after year, perched on a pile of antique books, watching television. ''I didn't know what to say to her half the time,'' Marisa says of the two years she lived upstairs, ''but she didn't help. She would not speak to me. She'd sit there, with the television blaring. I adored her, but she was a tough lady, my grandmother. The only person who had any control over Schiap was the Chinese cook, Jean. He would stamp his feet and yell at her, in this French which nobody could understand, and she was absolutely terrified of him.''

The sisters say they have yet to come to terms with the fact that their grandmother sold the house without notifying the family and that the new owner chose to demolish the place in 1993. ''It's horrific that they would allow that house to be knocked down,'' Berry says. ''It was charged with so much history, and not just my family's. I think it was owned by Napoleon's mistress at one stage. I haven't been to Paris much of late -- it was never my favorite place, so it doesn't hold the nostalgia for me that it does for Marisa -- but last time I was in Paris, I just couldn't go down rue de Berri.''

Marisa has likewise avoided visiting the site of her former residence. ''How can I go down that street and not see Schiap's house there?'' she says. ''It was like a museum, just one we happened to grow up in. It's been too painful, but I might try this time.'' Despite the uncertainty of where her spiritual quest will lead her, Marisa Berenson is sure of one thing: she can never truly go home again.

SISTER ACTS

As any paparazzo can tell you, two (or more) famous heads are better than one.

THE DOLLYS: In the 20's, these Ziegfeld Follies dancers dazzled the public with their high living and low urges. Jenny and Rosie's myriad misadventures, including addictions to men, gambling and diamonds, made the tabloid antics of their successors look jejune.

THE MITFORDS: The six Mitford girls were aristocratic misfits whose antics scandalized Britain in the 1930's. Nancy, the eldest, remained respectable despite a series of novels that satirized the sexual mores of the upper class. The same cannot be said for her sisters Diana, who married the head of Britain's Fascist party, and Unity, who declared her love for Hitler and shot herself upon the outbreak of war. Diana surrvives in exile in France, while her only other living sister, Deborah, is the Duchess of Devonshire.

THE CUSHINGS: Truman Capote bewitched and finally betrayed the three glamorous Cushing girls, whose many marriages formed a blueprint of social engineering. Betsey began by marrying F.D.R.'s son James, later movin' on up to John Hay Whitney. Minnie nabbed herself Vincent Astor, but made a wrong turn when she divorced him for the homosexual painter James Fosburgh. And Babe, who would end her life as a Manhattan style icon, first struck it rich with the Standard Oil heir Stanley Mortimer, whom she later passed over for the womanizing William Paley.

THE GABORS: These spectacularly untalented Magyar minxes -- Magda, Eva and Zsa-Zsa -- turned social climbing en famille into a family parlor game.

THE BOUVIERS: To this day, the beautiful Bouviers remain irresistible to documentarians and gossip columnists alike. Jackie married two of the world's most glamorous men, while Lee first styled herself as a princess (a title many disputed her right to bear), and ultimately wound up with Hollywood's hottest director -- in 1977, that is.

THE WILLIAMSES: Though not the first famous female tennis sisters, Venus and Serena are undeniably the sport's most loyal. They have been accused of forfeiting matches to avoid playing against each other.

THE SYKESES: The transplanted British beauties Plum and Lucy didn't flinch when their cut-glass accents and A-list connections weren't enough to keep them in the public eye: they summoned reinforcements. Enter Alice, their equally good-natured little sister, who arrived from London last year to help pal Lulu Guinness's burgeoning handbag business.

THE MILLERS: These social Graces -- Pia, Marie-Chantal and Alexandra -- appeared on the scene like muses of the Manhattan party circuit and went on to prove that even the high-born daughters of a multimillionaire businessman can marry up. The eldest, Pia, got a Getty, while her two younger siblings bagged themselves princes -- Marie-Chantal is married to Greece's exiled Crown Prince Pavlos, while Alexandra married Alexandre Von Furstenberg, the son of Prince Egon and the ravishing designer Diane.

THE HILTONS: If the Millers are the Graces of Gotham's smart set, then the Hiltons are its Furies. The hotel chain heiresses Nicky, 19, and Paris, 17, are the table-dancing terrors of New York nightlife. Blending downtown outrageousness with their uptown pedigree, the Hilton sisters have made the city's tabloids into their own personal photo diary.

THE RONSONS: Well connected and well adjusted, the D.J. Samantha and the designer Charlotte rule downtown nightlife. They are known to travel in packs with other power sisters, like Kidada and Rashida Jones and Lola and Stella Schnabel. -- Horacio Silva and Ben Widdicombe